What I Have Learned After 30 Years of Healing from Grief
Image by Sixteen Miles Out/Unsplash
It’s a day I will never forget. I was heading home after two years travelling, living and working in Asia. Flying from Japan back to the UK, I decided to spend a month in Thailand, for a last burst of fun and adventure before the serious grind of adult life began. I called home, only for my mum to tell me my dad had died.
It was the worst day of my life and, in a state of shock and bewilderment, I eventually flew home to chilly England. Anyone who has experienced a sudden, traumatic loss has some sense of the visceral, in-your-bones shock and pain it involves. Eventually, after months of feeling this way, I realised I wasn’t processing my grief because, as a 25-year-old man, I just didn’t know how. I felt numb and frozen much of the time, so found a wise, kind counsellor who helped me unlock that frozen grief inside and let it flow.
My first self-help book, Heal Your Trauma: How to Overcome a Painful Childhood to Become Happy and Whole Again, tells the story of this loss and how, over the last 30-odd years, I have managed to heal the wounds inflicted on that awful day. It also shares everything I have learned in those three decades, as well as the 16 years of practising psychotherapy, helping others heal their wounds, whether inflicted in adulthood or, more commonly, at a much younger age.
And in this post, I would like to offer two hard-won pearls of wisdom, from that 30-plus-year journey, about love, loss and how to rebuild your shattered heart after a life-changing loss.
Clichéd but true: the only way out is through
As a young man, I had no idea how to deal with grief. Although my childhood was by no means easy, I coped well enough until I lost my dad. And with hindsight, I now see that I managed to cope in two main ways: using substances to numb/escape painful thoughts and feelings, and detaching from them through a minute-by-minute, habitual but unconscious process of dissociation. I grew up in north London, in a hedonistic cohort of peers who all smoked weed, drank and went on to experiment with stronger substances. This was just what you did, where I’m from.
As a happily, mindfully sober near-60-year-old, I look back on teenage me with great love, affection and empathy. I was so self-conscious and insecure, I thought copious quantities of weed would help (in fact, they only made me more self-conscious and eroded my confidence) and maintained this pattern of relying on substances for much of my adult life. So when that wave of raw grief washed over me, I had no way of processing or navigating it. I had just never felt that much, so didn’t have the tools when it mattered.
The detaching – common to many men, I would say – was of course not conscious. I just never felt that much, unless I took something mood-altering. It was only after losing my dad, then embarking first on my own personal therapy and then a three-year counselling training, which was powerfully experiential, that I realised how numb I had been for much of my life. And neither of these coping strategies were much use, when that raw, overwhelming grief pulled me down into its depths.
If you’re going through something right now, whether that’s a bereavement like mine, a heartbreaking divorce, losing your job, serious illness or any other painful loss, let me first send you all my love, warm thoughts and strength for your recovery. It’s so hard, isn’t it. You might feel like the pain will never end, or that it’s a towering mountain and you’re at the base, peering up at this impossible-looking obstacle between you and a happier life.
But I also know that it is possible to recover, find solid ground beneath your feet again and, eventually heal, however daunting and impossible that may feel right now. Remember that your brain, nervous system and body know exactly how to grieve, how to recover, how to heal. They have an in-built drive to health, which is an unstoppable force if we just clear the obstacles out of the way – which I did when I saw that first, kind counsellor all those years ago.
Grief is love
This short, simple, pithy statement resonated so deeply with me when I first heard it. We tend to think of grief and loss as somehow separate from the normal stuff of life – falling in love, getting married, raising a family. But just as life and death are inextricably linked, so are love and loss. As so often, Buddhist teachings contain great wisdom about the inevitable suffering of life (living in a human body means we will get sick, age and eventually die one day) but also the optional suffering, which we – unconsciously, of course – inflict on ourselves.
As the Buddha explained in his Four Noble Truths, this second form of suffering arises when we desperately try to ignore, deny or fight against the first form. To illustrate this, the Buddha told his followers a story about a man walking through the forest, who was struck with an arrow. This, of course, would be very painful – we could call this ‘first-arrow suffering’. But imagine, taught the Buddha, that in response to this, the man then shot himself with another arrow: ‘second-arrow suffering’.
This is an all-too-human response, for example when I felt the profound pain of my father’s loss, but had no ways of coping with it, so tried to drink it away, or numb it away. Neither worked, instead creating new forms of pain like depression, which I did experience for many years after losing my dad. This depression was second-arrow suffering, because I had to learn to turn towards the pain, let myself feel it, talk about my dad as much as I needed to, cry often, get plenty of hugs. That’s how I eventually processed the grief, so I can write a post like this about losing my dad – feeling sad, of course, because I always will. But the sadness is bearable, pleasurable even, because it reminds me of him, helps me feel connected to him and all the good memories of our too-short time together.
Grief is love.
I hope you found these insights helpful. It’s important to add that, of course, grieving is not easy, nor is the recovery from it. Just that it is possible, with patience, determination and skilled, loving support. If I did it, you can too.
Love,
Dan ❤️
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